


tread lightly on my ground

by Stereotypicality



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Comfort, F/M, Nightmares
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-12
Updated: 2019-02-12
Packaged: 2019-10-26 17:40:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17750474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stereotypicality/pseuds/Stereotypicality
Summary: Rose has had the same nightmare two hundred and sixty three times.





	tread lightly on my ground

**Author's Note:**

> Requested by lucy on tumblr, beta'd by spellcheck, and emotional breakdown by me.
> 
>  
> 
> Title from Andante, Andante by ABBA.

Rose shot up out of bed, her hair plastered to her forehead with sweat. The nightmare was coming more and more often, and each time it hurt more. Tonight, she awoke with a physical pain in her stomach. Rose sighed, and pulled herself out of bed, she was too afraid to fall back to sleep, for fear of the horrible things she saw in her dreams. 

She snuck into the bathroom and ran some water to wash her face. She didn’t really need to be quiet, The Doctor slept like a rock, but she knew if he did wake up, he’d know she’d had a nightmare.  
He always insisted she tell him anything that made her uncomfortable. “The side effects of our kind of travel can be dangerous,” he’d told her. But Rose didn’t want to tell him. She didn’t want to tell him how often she saw his body, laid out and bleeding, too far from home for them to ever survive. The sheer amount of times she’d watched The Doctor be injured and without a cure, Rose didn’t want to know. But she did. She kept a tally behind a painting in her room. Two hundred and sixty-three times now, the first one coming soon after she’d begun traveling with The Doctor, back when he wore leather and didn’t spend as much time on his hair. 

The water had been running for far too long, so she splashed water onto her face and turned off the tap, resolving herself to go to the library, finding a good book would keep her awake long enough to put the nightmare out of her mind. She returned to her room to get a robe, but jumped when she discovered The Doctor holding the painting that hung right where her tally was kept, his back to the door as he stared at the wall. 

“What is this?” he asked, not even turning around to look at her. “It’s not a trip tracker, we’ve been a lot more places than this, it’s not a tracker of days you’ve been traveling with me, you’re one hundred and six days off.” The Doctor spun around to face her, the painting still clutched in his hands. “What are you tracking?” he repeated. 

Rose bit her lip and sat down on her bed, pulling the duvet over her shoulders as The Doctor continued to stare a her. 

“Nightmares.” He said it simply, like it was plain as day. “You’ve been having nightmares. Why didn’t you tell me?”

Rose sighed. “If I told you, I’d have to tell you what they were about, and I don’t want to think about that.”

The Doctor came and sat next to her. ”We don’t have to talk about it. I can look, if you’d like?” 

“Not tonight, Doctor, not tonight.” 

The Doctor nodded and stood up to leave Rose, to head back to the console room, but Rose grabbed his hand and pulled him back. 

“Stay with me,” she whispered. 

And though he maintained he could refuse her, he never did.

**Author's Note:**

> hmu on tumblr at stereotypicality or thirteenlikesgirls


End file.
